TechCrunch
Despite Google's Gains, iPhone Still Edges Out Android Devices In App And Overall Smartphone Usage, Says Forrester
Android has decisively overtaken iOS as the world’s most popular smartphone platform, both in terms of existing devices and sales, but it seems like usage habits are harder to break. A report out today from Forrester on mobile marketing techniques includes some interesting numbers on app usage, which show that overall, iOS users are still the more avid users across a range of app categories, as well as various smartphone functions.
In a survey of 13,000 iPhone users and 15,000 Android users in the U.S., Forrester found that Weather apps remain the most popular category among consumers across both platforms, followed by social networking, navigation/mapping and gaming apps.
While weather doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that commands a lot of minutes of engagement, you can see where it would stand out because of habitual usage. (This could also go some way to explaining why Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, during the company’s last earnings call, touted the company’s weather app as being the number-one in 20 different countries, up 150% since its relaunch in April.)
What’s notable is that in each of the cases, iOS appears to be a more engaged group of users — some 71% of iOS users versus 65% of Android users are checking weather apps regularly; social networking breaks down to 63% and 56%; and mapping is 60% and 52% — but ultimately the platforms are consistent in terms of what is most popular.
When it comes to overall smartphone usage, we appear to see the same trend at play across the two platforms. Looking this time at 1,300 iPhone and 3,100 Android owners in Europe, Forrester found that internet browsing is the most popular activity across both, followed by text messaging, app usage, search and social networking.
Across all of these, iOS continued to outscore Android in terms of usage. Some 91% of iPhone users say they browsed the internet weekly or more often compared to 80% on Android; in messaging the breakdown was 90% to 83%; and apps were 89% to 76%.
Forrester’s report — primarily about the disconnect between consumers and mobile marketers who are misguided in trying to reach them, and what marketers should be doing differently — doesn’t really go into detail to explain why Apple iPhone owners continue to remain more avid users of their devices over Android owners. This is, however, a trend that has been the case for some time now.
What these figures do seem to show is that while Android continues to grow in popularity, it has yet to grab that premium class of consumers who use their phones the most and are the most attractive consumers for app makers.
That could be because of history — iPhone users were premium, early adopters, whereas Android users are later adopters who may be more price sensitive — or it could point to the iPhone remaining a more user-friendly device overall. In any case, numbers out in May from Distimo seem to indicate another by-product: apps for the iPhone App Store still make more revenues than those on the Google Play store for Android.
With A Launch Fast Approaching, BlackBerry Pushes Out iOS & Android BBM Beta Invites
BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins confirmed this past May that BBM would come to iOS and Android “this summer”, which of course means that advertised launch window is rapidly closing. There’s still no official word on when BlackBerry is going to push its cross-platform messaging app out the door, some new images released today indicate things are chugging along at a decent clip.
The first image (seen above) was obtained by BGR and depicts a seemingly near-final version of the app running on a Samsung Galaxy S III… though it doesn’t shed much light on what the BBM Android experience is actually like. Those early impressions should be trickling out any day now, as BlackBerry has also begun extending BBM beta invitations to certain Android users whose devices run 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or later.
Frankly, it’s still a little confusing to me that BlackBerry is taking this approach in the first place. I mean, for a long while there, BlackBerrys were the smartphones to own and at least part of its appeal hinged on its curiously hardy (well, mostly hardy) messaging system. Of course, making the leap to alternative platforms presents its own set of issues, not least of which is the fact that iOS and Android are already saturated with free or freemium messaging apps.
Then again, BlackBerry may just be banking on BBM’s prominence as a way to build more buzz around the BlackBerry brand. It could honestly use some help, especially in light of some strained financials. Company representatives said during BlackBerry’s most recent (and none too confidence-inspiring) earnings call that roughly 40% of its device shipments over the past quarter were its new BB10 phones, which works out to 2.72 million units moved. That’s more than double what the company shipped in the previous quarter, but the folks in Waterloo apparently didn’t think enough of the number to break it out in an earnings release. The same goes for BlackBerry’s subscriber base, which dipped by some 4 million users between Q4 2013 and Q1 2014 (before you assault me in the comments, BB’s fiscal calendar is a little weird like that) with nary a mention in the initial release.
But still, pushing out a messaging app into two marketplaces that are already full to the brim with them is a very curious move indeed, and one that on the surface seems like something of a stinker. Maybe I’m wrong — maybe bringing BBM to the masses just might be what BlackBerry needs. Fortunately, it looks like we won’t have much longer to wait before we see how things actually work out.
YC Startup True Link Financial Is Out To Help The Elderly Avoid Scammers With Pre-Paid Visa Cards
It’s a heartbreaking and, unfortunately, common story: an elderly man receives a phone call from someone claiming to be his granddaughter asking for him to wire money to get her out of a sticky situation. A late night infomercial offers a deep discount on dishware without mentioning the hundreds of dollars in nonrefundable shipping fees.
These are the scams targeting the elderly that True Link Financial, a Y Combinator startup that launches today, is hoping to help families avoid by equipping prepaid Visa cards with personalized fraud protection.
CEO Kai Stinchcombe said he had been looking for a solution to this problem for a few years before founding True Link, after his 92-year-old grandmother began writing up to 75 checks a month for organizations posing as charities. Banks can’t do anything to reverse this kind of damage once the check is written and sent, he said. Families don’t have many options besides taking away their elderly family members’ checkbooks and depriving them of their sense of autonomy.
True Link develops risk profiles for elderly people, who are typically signed up by their adult family members. If an individual over-gives to charities, they can limit donations to a list of approved organizations while blocking payments to potential scams. Stipulations can be set on only allowing transactions made in person, and payments can be capped at a certain amount per purchase.
All this goes through a pre-paid True Link Visa card, filled through the person’s checking account, which is free for the first year and costs $20 annually after that. True Link acts as the preauthorizer, giving it the power to see incoming charges and approve or deny them accordingly.
Scamming is a grey market, Stinchcombe said, and it’s hard to put an exact number on the scope of scams out there. But he estimates that there are 10 million people in the U.S. above a certain age who are living alone and susceptible to fraud.
True Link is currently working on building its list of fraudulent and potentially fraudulent organizations, said Claire McDonnell, who leads product development and interviewed roughly 400 elderly people and families in market research this year. Outside of the team’s efforts, reports of scams having been coming in from families.
Long term, True Link is planning to scale by partnering with large retirement homes and organizations for caregiving, retirement home placement, and health care.
Getting a parent or grandparent set up with True Link does, of course, mean introducing the particularly difficult subject of restricting their financial independence.
“It can be extremely emotionally difficult,” McDonnell said. “The way we think about it is this: if you believe there are people out there who want to take your money, you want to be protected. If you have a problem, you have to solve it. [True Link] is for people who are already having that conversation and are used to managing [their parents'] finances already.”
Taking away a person’s financial independence entirely comes at great emotional cost, McDonnell pointed out, and it accelerates decline, especially in people with dementia. True Link preserves some of that autonomy while preventing elderly people from needlessly blowing through their retirement fund.
In Stinchcombe’s words, True Link’s mission is quite simple:
“Fuck these scammers.”
Shopify Acquires Toronto-Based Design Firm Jet Cooper To Help It Remake Ecommerce
Toronto based startup success story Shopify has acquired Jet Cooper, a Toronto-based design agency founded in 2009, for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition brings together the Ottawa-based Shopify, which launched around seven years ago with the aim of making online stores better design and usability, together with Jet Cooper, which has emerged as one of Canada’s top user experience and design firms.
Jet Cooper’s reputation is well-earned, and has garnered it work from some top-tier clients including Cineplex, TEDxToronto, Telus, Kick and more. The company will be fulfilling its existing contracts and obligations, and helping transition current clients to outside agencies for continued support, but it will be folded into Shopify completely as part of the deal, and will focus all of its resources on expanding Shopify’s Toronto presence and fuelling continued evolution of the online shopping space.
I spoke to Tobi Lütke, Shopify’s founder and CEO about the deal, and he said that it was one of those situations where you work with a company and keep running into them, and then someone suggests combining forces and it just makes a ton of sense. Their goals were aligned, and the talent Jet Cooper represented was too good a package to pass up.
“In the next couple of months we’re going to start announcing a bunch of new stuff, and the team will really help with those initiatives,” he said. But the acquisition, which brings all of the Jet Cooper team over to Shopify and puts Jet Cooper CEO Satish Kanwar in charge of the Toronto office as Director of Operations.
Design-focused talent acqui-hires are not quite as common as their engineering-focused equivalent, but companies like Facebook regularly pick up small agencies in moves like this one to boost their chops and inject some outside innovation into their in-house design team. Shopify is no startup anymore, with 60,000 stores among its clients that have processed 35 million orders and resulted in $2 billion in online sales. Grabbing Jet Cooper, which is a Canadian powerhouse in terms of talented team members, should help them continue to differentiate as more startup players challenge their established position.
German Publishers Can't Wean Themselves Off Google News, Despite Winning Copyright Law Change
Germany’s new copyright law comes into force today but several major German publishers haven’t rushed to pull their news snippets from Google News, despite lobbying in favour of tightening the law. On the contrary, they have opted in to carry on having their snippets displayed. Call it a love/hate relationship, where ‘love’ refers to the traffic generated by click-throughs from Google News and ‘hate’ to the sense of indignation that Google gets to cream off news content and use it to power its own aggregator service.
German publishers including Axel Springer – whose publications include the newspapers Die Welt and Bild – had lobbied for German copyright law to be extended to cover the snippets of stories Google displays in its News service. They also lobbied for search engines to pay publishers to display these news snippets. But it’s one of several big German publishers that have apparently opted in to Google News.
A screengrab of today’s Google News German homepage shows several Die Welt stories in prominent positions:
Ahead of the new law coming into force, Google changed how Google News operates in Germany, making it an opt-in service, rather than the current default opt-out in all other markets where it operates a local Google News service.
At the time of writing, Axel Springer was not available for comment but according to an AP report (via the Verge) the publisher said it still expects to receive money from Google eventually. Two more German publishers — Spiegel Online and Zeit Online — have also opted into Google News for the moment, according to AP.
Google has had to deal with similar disputes with publishers elsewhere in Europe — including in Belgium and France — but those dispute have not resulted in copyright law extensions. Instead, Google settled with French publishers after agreeing to set up a €60 million fund to support French publishers’ digital initiatives. It also settled a dispute with Belgian publishers in December by agreeing to partner with them and help promote their services and content.
Crown And Caliber Brings The Watch Swap Meet Into The 21st Century
Selling watches online, if you’re the kind who does such a thing, is a business fraught with peril. Do you trust Craigslist where the purchaser could be a scammer? Or do you trust eBay where the purchaser is most definitely a scammer? Even the watch forums, rarified as they are, usually result in heartbreak.
That’s why Hamilton Powell is running CrownAndCaliber.com, a simple service that allows you to price and sell your fancy watches without hassle.
Powell isn’t just the owner of Crown And Caliber, he’s also a watch nut.
“Prior to running C&C, I spent 8 years in private equity. After several years of working with two different private equity funds, I raised my own fund in 2007. C&C is a portfolio company of that fund, and I felt so strongly about C&C that instead of bringing in a CEO, I elected to run it myself,” said Powell.
The service offers to buy watches at the “industry’s highest price point” and will individually appraise all watches submitted. They company then turns around and sells the watches – presumably at a profit – on their own site or via other means. For example, they have a fairly large selection of Rolex watches at acceptable – but not bargain basement – prices.
The numbers are looking good.
“We are funded by a $20 million private equity fund and have a multi-million line of credit from a major bank,” said Powell. “We have purchased thousands of watches since our inception. This includes anything from a $750 to watches well over $100,000. We are currently purchasing, on average, 10 watches per day, though that grows every month.”
The company sends you a prepaid, insured package and then services the watches in-house. While there are plenty of sites that claim to buy watches, Powell believes his is the first to offer a sort of full-service depot for collectors and folks looking to get rid of their old timepieces.
The only other location for sellers, forums, are fun but customers are few and far between if you’re selling an unpopular watch. C&C, however, is ready to bid on nearly everything as evidenced by their extensive list of brands in which they deal.
Are the prices they offer fair? As far as I’m able to tell, yes. Rolexes go for about $5,000 and Omegas a little bit less. Unlike, say, electronic sales sites like Gazelle, watches tend to hold value a bit more and C&C respects that.
You could also simply purchase a trench coat and attempt to sell your watches on the street. However C&C seems to have at least taken some of the nastiness out of the collector’s racket, which is always a good thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment